With the development of technology, especially Internet and digital TV, interactive media has become increasingly popular. Right now, the most widely used interactive media are the web pages or web browsers. In the web pages, there are many hyperlinks embedded. When the users click on the hyperlinks, it may go or submit to the other web pages. By using these embedded hyperlinks, the contents in web pages are interactive, and become more valuable to the users. In order to bring the successful story of Internet to TV, video or movies, many new technologies have been developed to put some things like hyperlinks in the TV programs or movies, allowing the users to interact with the content publishers. Here TV is digital TV. For example, on the TV, there is a toy advertisement. When the users use the mouse or the like to click on the hyperlinks, it brings the users to the buy or detail information page.
However, putting hyperlinks into the contents in TV, video, or game programs usually need broadcasting protocols or standard change. It costs a lot. In addition, the two-way connection is required for the receiving terminal or device. However, most users are just using one-way connection to receive the TV signals, such as regular public TV or Satellite TV. For the existing TV, especially analog TV broadcasting systems, hyperlinks cannot be added into its contents.
When people use PCs or Laptop computers to look for or view information through the Internet, they often use the mouse to click on or scroll the browser. However, when people use TV to view the information from Internet, they need something different than a mouse. Therefore, the so-called smart device has been invented, which is a small computer display device. One of the disadvantage of this kind of smart device is it will add a lot of cost to TV and the like. Another disadvantage of this kind of smart device is it cannot be in a very small size, like regular remote control.
At home, TVs are not the only electronic devices. We may have desktop or laptop computers, PDAs, cellular/regular phones, game consoles, VCRs, DVD players, mp3 players, and singing or karaoke machines. The current interactive media systems are only allow you to interact with the same devices.
When people use TVs to browse on Internet, they have to use a mouse-like device to move the cursor on the big TV screen. However, moving a small cursor on a big screen is not convenient for many people, especially older people. People have watched TV for years by just pressing buttons on a small remote control, and many of them still prefer pressing keys or buttons to browse on Internet on a small remote control or the like. When comparing the regular TV remote control, the so-called smart device is not small enough for the most people.